Drawing inspiration from The Decameron and One Thousand and One Nights, Fourteen Days is a “collaborative novel,” which brings to mind thoughts of exquisite corpses and shared Google Docs with a slew of anonymous animals. However, it is effectively a collection of short stories by 36 American and Canadian authors, edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, and connected through a framing narrative by Preston.
Taking place between March 31, 2020, and April 13, 2020, Fourteen Days is set in an apartment building, the Fernsby Arms, on the lower east side of New York City. Here, a diverse collection of residents gradually come together to build community and support each other during nightly meetups on the building’s roof, where they drown their sorrows in cocktails, bang pots and pans for essential workers, and share stories from life before COVID-19. The building superintendent, Yessie—a Romanian-American lesbian with asthma whose father is in a nursing home when lockdown begins—frames the story as its narrator and supposed archivist, recording and transcribing the rooftop storytelling sessions of the building’s tenants as a way to pass the time and distract herself from the raging pandemic.
Though the residents were strangers before these rooftop sessions, they quickly develop a rapport and routine, even painting a mural together to honor their shared experience, their shared trauma. They are a multigenerational group, described as “the left-behinds.” Yessie reflects, “Naturally, anyone who could had already left New York. The wealthy and professional classes fled the city like rats from a sinking ship, skittering and squeaking out to the Hamptons, Connecticut, the Berkshires, Cape Cod, Maine—anywhere by New Covid City.” Still, there’s little desperation or struggle for day-to-day survival described among the neighbors, and they appear to be faring well with the Fernsby Arms to protect them from the circling sounds of sirens outside, the refrigerator trucks for the dead, and the tent hospital in Central Park, all of which Yessie notes only in passing.
Fourteen Days is annoyingly rose-colored at times, as the real-life stresses and trauma of lockdown only lightly impact the residents, who appear to be mostly protected from the world even as they acknowledge protests in the streets and nursing home outbreaks. Everyone pretty much agrees to mask up, making masks out of scrap fabric or Hermès scarves. Instacart and toilet paper jokes are made, but no one ever has to make do without. The cancellation of Eurovision 2020 appears to be as traumatizing as the pandemic itself for at least one character. Tensions rise enough for minor verbal sparring every now and then, but ultimately everyone forgives and forgets, positioned as being stronger for it in the end. Indeed, the only real tension in the book might come from a reader’s own memories of those two weeks of lived experience, mapped onto the characters and premise of this fictional version.
Of course, within the framing narrative, the reason for these simplifications is eventually explained, but the twist ending falls a bit flat and does little to alleviate the cognitive dissonance around this pandemic privilege. In a year when The Washington Post and other news outlets report that COVID-19 is once again surging in the U.S., this book feels, at times, like an attempt to forget or at least to remember something far better than what was.
As characters, the Fernsby Arms residents often seem flat, largely identified through referential nicknames and other shorthand nods at personality in lieu of character development. Many characters feel as though they were plucked out of a COVID lockdown stereotypes bucket, with little attention given to emotional motivations or history, though others have some depth and nuance. Similarly, the stories shared on the rooftop—including tales related to the Vietnam War, 9/11, the Iraq War, polio outbreaks, Trump’s presidency, ghost stories, and curses—feel like an exercise in checking off lists of trauma and coping.
Some of the individual stories contributed by the collaborating authors offer moments of inspiration and healing: De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s story of the love and pain experienced by a father and daughter; Tommy Orange’s about a man who seeks revenge after a hit-and-run, only to find himself forever changed by the realization of his own capacity for violence; Celeste Ng’s about a family matriarch full of superstitions and the ability to curse someone with nothing more than a piece of paper and an ice cube; Joseph Cassara’s story of rabbits and trauma bonding experiences. All of these examples startle the reader out of a stupor, wrestling with real questions of human existence in unpredictable and challenging ways. Unfortunately, these are in the minority, despite the excellent credentials of the contributing authors.
In the end, Fourteen Days succeeds as an escapist beach read that just happens to be set during two traumatic weeks in recent history. Despite the potential in the premise, it is a mostly forgettable collection of stories that feels off-key in a world still attempting to address the same public health issues as the book’s characters, despite the intervening four years. With little dramatic tension and stories that are inconsistent in their vast but often surface-level breadth, Fourteen Days is more of a novel-by-committee than a collaborative one.
